Monday, June 29, 2009

I love Montreal alleys...and I'm not alone. Apparently there is a master plan for creating more green space in the plateau in particular. The plateau, where I live, reminds me a little of downtown Brooklyn and also of Philadelphia Center City, the part the juts up against South Philly. The alleys are of varying sizes and lengths of course, but most are lush and after today's rain, filled with exquisite, mossy air. Green cascades down from vine covered patios, canopies from fence to fence, leaps across, sometimes dipping to ridiculous depths. There are rarely cars in the alleys and even when they are wider than the average plateau street--which they sometimes are--there are few cars parked. Most are busy with cats, lots and lots of cats. Others with street hockey, girls on bicycles, dog walkers, cyclists--sometimes on huge unicycles. Sounds of summer drift down from patios, flashes of sizzling meat and pot. Below, the concrete is often calving, wanting to move on, which makes for treacherous cycling. Rifts of chamomile and vetches rise up out of the cracks, long pools of water collect. Garage doors are covered with vines, posters, graffiti, and with the biggest single moving day in the city nearly upon us, the furniture and garbage bags are beginning to pile up. Nowhere is there pressure to move on, no rush, only the cats slinking under wonky fences, someone out with a cell phone, smoking, carrying a baguette. It is certainly a city for the people. Imagine that.

Friday, June 26, 2009

matter. And an eight-million-dollar ferry shoves offfor Rochester, no souls aboard. I see you,you know, idling like a limousine through the old

neighbourhoods, your tinted windows. In whatthey call “the mind’s eye.” Catch me herein real time, if that’s the term for it. We work

our drinks under threat of a general brownout.Phospholipase is activated by bitter stimuli.Back home, we call this a beer parlour. I washed my hair at 4 a.m., he says. The full moon, it was wack. He can’t sleep. The womanwho says pardon my French, over and over,

can’t sleep. They are drunk as young corn. Sweet,white, freestone peaches. A bit stepped-on.You said we’d have fun.Do I look happy?

Our fingers, our ankles, swell in unison. Wordspreads. “Toronto,” in Huron, means“place of meetings.” Even now, you may be

like an angry jelly. Pardon my French. The cityon rails, grinding toward a wreck the lakecooks up. When you arrive, you may

be soaked to the skin. A tall drink of water. Darkenmy door. All of my organs are fully involved. He’s a little freshet breeze. We are as any microbes

inhabiting extreme environments, survivingin the free-living or parasitic modes. Chins abovethe germ line. Is it true a rat can spring a latch.

Is it true all creatures love their children. Raccoonsand skunks smell society in decline. That sagat the middle. Rat weather. Fly weather. A certain

absence of tenderness. Who will you believe.Bear me away to a motel by the highway. I likea nice motel by the highway, an in-ground pool.

It’s a take it or leave it type deal. Eutrophic:of lakes and rivers. See now, she says,that’s the whole reason you can’t sit up

on the railing, so you don’t fall over. Freon,exhaust, the iron motes of dry lightning. Getting pushed, he says, is not falling. Jangling metal

in pockets, you walk balanced in your noise,breath like a beam. I harbour ill will. By thisshall you know me. Caducous:

not persistent. Of sepals, falling offas a flower opens. Of stipules, falling off as leavesunfold. Speak of the devil, the devil appears.

Karen Solie, from Pigeon, Anansi 2009

“Pathology of the Senses” opens into the concentrated heat of a lake-side southern Ontario town. This heat, “an inanimate slur, wool gathering, hanging like a bad suit,” sustains itself through the entire poem. Four pages of tercets, stripped of all exposition and direction, slog onward, unfold. The speaker’s tone is humourless, uninflected: questions are presented as statements, flattened out by the inundating present, left unanswered. As “cloud racks up” above the lake, the poem racks up definitions for oligotrophic, eutrophic, caducous, absyssal, meanings for Toronto and Ontario. There is a repetition of cliché phrases: Darken my door. A tall drink of water. Pardon my french. And the doubling continues, in “fly weather,” “rat weather.” There is “a certain absence of tenderness,” and this intrigues me: What does Solie have in mind, opening the book into this stifling heat, with this unvarying tone?

The poem, in the simplest sense, is about two people wandering through a nameless town by a lake. Having spent some time in Wasaga Beach on Lake Huron, and Port Dover on Lake Erie, I can imagine this place, an “extreme environment,” set up purely for tourist season. The speaker and her companion, “drunk as young corn” and “a bit stepped-on,” have been here before. Fragments of their dialogue are interspersed with the details tallying in the speaker’s mind. They wander through, the speaker feeling a particular sense of melancholy, “the onset/of a chronic understanding.” This, for me, links back to the title, which implies that we are plagued by our senses. I think the more interesting nuance the title suggests is that by studying our senses (paying close attention) we discover the changes that occur through the experience. Here, “Our fingers, our ankles, swell in unison,” and by the end the speaker (and reader) is known for the ill will she harbours.

The last line, another cliché phrase turned poignant, is rewarding, haunting: “Speak of the devil,” the speaker warns, “the devil appears.” This line is, for me, the reason Solie starts this collection here: if the poems beyond this point attend to our most difficult man-made objects (tractors, aircraft, fossil fuels) and human feelings (compassion, disgust, responsibility) it is only because we alone have called them into being.

This poem, I think, is meant to be read slowly, demands the reader’s active attention; “Pathology of the Senses” is at once extraordinary and tough. If it’s hard, it’s because it conjurs up a contemporary North American malaise, which is complicated at best. In her Globe and Mail review of Pigeon, Meg Walker is reminded of Don McKay’s essays in Vis à Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry and Wilderness. In his newest book from Gaspereau Press, The Muskwa Assemblage, McKay’s thoughts about wilderness continue: “There is, says Simone Weil, an informal part of the soul. I think something like that part is where the wilderness resonates, where we sense ourselves to be, not masters of creation, not technological wunderkinds, but beings among beings.” Here, at the beginning of this book, we are reduced to our senses. A watery mirage rises up from the scorched sidewalk in front of us: a significant change occurs through this experience.

_______________

Sheryda Warrener’s poems have been published in literary journals across Canada, including The Malahat Review, Event, The Antigonish Review, Grain, and The Fiddlehead, and in the anthology Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets (Nightwood, 2004). This spring, she was shortlisted for the Malahat Review Long Poem prize. A recent graduate from the MFA program at the University of British Columbia, Sheryda lives in Vancouver, where she is completing her first poetry manuscript.

How do you know what a book is? And what it's for? Or how it should be read. I like Richard Nash's idea that a book is more communal than we understand it to be. He points to the one positive growth area in the publishing world--that of the book club. Because yes, reading is a solo act but can it be said to be complete without the discussion portion? There is a part of me that thinks people in the industry are a tad afraid of the power of the book club and of the liberalization of the book discussion--after all, what will they do?

Of course I don't see one thing replacing another. That is to say intelligent discussion is always worth listening in on, and buying a paper, or a pass, or whatever, to be part of it. And that's the point. I don't want to know what your verdict is about a given book, I want to know what you think, what you wonder, what stays with you, what aspect of the text made you pause, what frustrated you, where did it lead your thinking? Did you walk away wanting to "do" something? Think something? Create something?

As for the physical representation that currently is the book--what if that changes? It has changed, and will likely continue to. What is of value is what we value. What is that?

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Thanks to Bookninja for pointing out This plea for more book reviewing in Canada, and in particular at the CBC. And I agree, Canada Reads is not enough. In my humble opinion the problem has to do with a lack of guts. Yes, guts. It takes guts to be a good reviewer, a good publisher, a good producer and/or editor. One can't wait for someone else to say what's worth reading, one needs to go out on a limb and make more daring choices. And then open up those choices to the common reader.

As the industry gets pummeled this is the very aspect that becomes more scarce. Everyone becomes less daring at the very time when daring is what is needed. The Ceeb, and the Writers Festivals, make more and more predictable choices, taking less and less risks. Piggybacking on the choices of other, bigger literary fish. Not the way to build an interesting literature. The reason Can Lit was so exciting "back in the day" is that people were making bold choices, big bold choices that they believed in, that they promoted and in doing so, created a dynamic literary world

Now they just look at the New York Times, or the London Review of Books, or the prize lists. We're becoming reduced to a people who only discuss books in terms of prizes... Those bloggers who do the work for nothing? Perhaps they are the ones doing that work now, making bolder choices, and actually unpacking texts for readers, not just celebrating the safe and the banal.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Summer reading is good, but what about summer listening? Rattling Books offers unabridged audio books, including Gallant's Montreal Stories, a collection of stories set in a Montreal that is geographically, if not socially recognizable. By that I mean the stories are steeped in their time and that has long passed. But the streets are the same, and the longing, and the human dynamics immediate. Looking forward to the new stories, but can't recommend these classics enough. Like Munro, Gallant gets away with enormous amounts of exposition. Why? Because she is a master of the sentence, aware of her twisting in it, and lovingly structured, each of them. Now, I'm wondering when Rattling Books is going to be available through iTunes because I definitely want more.

Also on the must-read list for the summer, Going Ashore, new stories from Gallant. And what about those selected letters I hear about? That will be interesting. Gallant is, like Elizabeth Smart, a writer Canadians can't quite come to terms with. She's not nice in the way we seem to want our writers to be, not nice enough, not predictable enough. She has opinions. You can't quite guess what she'll say next.

Don't believe me? Here are a few random comments I found on line. This first from a piece on her in Walrus:

Neither a Leon Rooke, a Glover, an Atwood, nor a Mavis Gallant made the list. (The latter name is not as surprising an omission as it may seem – Gallant being one of those writers whose work is universally respected and admired, yet which nobody – be honest – really likes.)

Here's John Metcalf on Gallant via Steven W. Beatty:

"Alice Munro’s career has been more visible but many readers and writers think that Mavis Gallant’s rather cold eye and stringent intellect will age better.."

Also from Steven W.Beatty, Alex Good who thinks the latter description of Gallant is “dead on:”

“I respect Gallant, but that cold eye, the way she seems to despise so many of her characters, puncturing their selfishness and snobbery in disdainful, ironic prose (a bit of the New Yorker house style?), gets to me.”

It baffles me that anyone would complain about Mavis Gallant’s lack of humour. I recorded and edited her Montreal Stories for Rattling Books and often laughed aloud while working on the tape. As for cold, I was impressed by her humanity. She knows how utterly ridiculous people can be and pokes merciless fun at it all while eliciting compassion. Far from cold.

Is it fair to say gender is somewhere at the root of this? I would think. It seems quite acceptable to couch any discourse around Gallant in terms of her person, her perceived person. Imagine framing discussion of Ondaatje, Carver, Ford, Richler, that way?

And by the way, the Montreal Stories audio book from Rattling Books makes a round trip from Toronto Montreal downright manageable. It's about 11 hours of listening.

One of my favorite places in Northern British Columbia. The salmon weren't there yet, hence no one hanging over the cliffs with a spear, fishing. I can't recall being there so early in June before, so a different order of wildflowers if you look close on that rock.

Friday, June 19, 2009

It's the time for summer reading lists. Here's a slightly different take on the genre. First, a list of the books that would make it into my suitcase if I had an unlimited budget. I'm not a fan of lists i in this sense, but there you have it. No order, no bests, just what I'm curious about.

The Hidden Wordsworth, Kenneth Johnston, Norton 1997Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life, Frances Wilson, FSG 2009(not sure either of these are the best choice for Wordsworth bios, still looking)Already packed (and started, and even in some cases, read several times):

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Venice was settled originally by refugees fleeing the barbarian hordes—who, apparently, didn’t like water. But that was then. This week, Swoon, a 31-year-old Brooklyn artist whose name is Caledonia “Callie” Curry, is leading a waterborne invasion of the Venice Biennale (she didn’t bother to try to get in officially) with a crew of 30 artists, musicians, and miscreants in tow. Though they have raised some $150,000 for this crash party, the money won’t show in the boats they’ll travel in, because the boats are made of trash—a symbol of the freedom that comes with radical self-reliance, and one that is meant to effect change. “Throughout history, pranksters have been looking at fences and then pushing them aside,” Swoon has said (the name came to an ex-boyfriend in a dream, in which he imagined her future as a graffiti artist long before her career began). “Through action, you can move the perception. It’s almost like a magic trick.”

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Dear TCR,Thank you for your ongoing excellentness. For the cover of the current issue, sliding out of the envelope this morning to reveal paint-splotched tires and pallets in a shrubby wood. Thank you for the smell of the ink and paper (no doubt toxic but I inhale deeply), and for including photographs in a literary journal, for including essays, catalog copy, non-fiction, all manner of text. Thanks for Karin Bubas (her name appears again), and the essay on "Stump Skulls" and the photo of "cart bombing" (downhill on Barclay is very good fyi). Am I simply nostalgic or is the thinking about architecture, art, and poetry reaching some kind of golden moment on the other side of the Rockies?

Thanks for the Ian Wallace shots from the early 70s, and for Colin Browne's "Kingfisher Annex: An Excerpt":

Monday, June 15, 2009

I don't believe people want to read books on Kindle, or any other such device, or perhaps not "only" read them there, or online.

I just don't buy it. And I don't think we have to buy it either.

And the new magazine store that opened up on Mont Royal very near me tells me I may be right. I have said it before, and if I'm wrong, I'll eat my words.

I really hope I am not wrong about this, but I have to ask, why must it be so? Because someone, or some corporation wants to make a lot of money by patenting the technology that will "handle" the next generation of books? Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done, or that we have to support it being done, or that this new technology need replace other ways. If nothing else, we can certainly learn that fact from the 20th Century.

Perhaps newspapers have been complacent in the face of all this change--like the east coast fisheries that kept on fishing itself out of Cod, knowing all along it was coming and doing nothing differently. And perhaps literary journals are too, and worse, perhaps we the consumers are a bit complacent, accepting the presence of such things without doing much to support the publications we love. It's hard, and it's expensive, and isn't there a way to find other sources of funding?

Speaking of all this, an interesting lack of coverage in the literary world around the recent Magazine awards in Canada. The Malahat did very well but sites such as BookNinja etc., didn't even bother reporting. Do magazines not matter? I know, I know, I keep saying this, but personally I love it when The Walrus, or Geist, roll in through the mail slot. The Griffins are all well and good, but would we have those without the literary journal? How do we get from beginner to prize winner without small publications? Without magazines?

On the other hand, guess how many copies of Malahat are sold annually? Something like 800. Can we increase that? Can Malahat bump its circulation by adding an online portion? The fact that I can get the New Yorker online doesn't stop me from having the print version and I don't aniticpate canceling my Malahat if they could give me an online archive. The future of print is not "out of our hands." Technologies come and go people. Do you want kindle? And if you do, how do you want it?

As for the matter of subscriptions, etc. How many students of Canadian literature have a subscription to The Malahat, or West Coast Line, or The Capilano Review, or The New Quarterly--journals all doing an exceptional job of publishing new and established voices. Those of us teaching creative writing can include an issue or two on our syllabus and bump up circulation that way and also let the kiddies know the value of these publications.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Tydsdal, Swift, SolieDaniel Scott Tysdal, Predicting The Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method, Coteau, 2006So few books take the risk of breaking out of predictable poetic form--on the level of the book I mean, as much as the poem inside. Tysdal's book looks more like a gallery catalog than poetry book. The last book that I recall successfully challenging the constraint of the bookshelf was Rachel Zolf's Masque (and Robert Majzel's Akoporo's Sleuth). Tysdal's poems are dry, humorous, concise. Post prairie, in Jon Paul Fiorentino's terms, and having fun with it, as above, the poem changes shape when folded. There are other, more conventional kinds of fun too:

According to most popular legendsthe prairie poet is the one for whomthe universe is broken into two:the half that is ground the way direst is groundin the cerise of a blistered popping;and the other half that is more like air,neither drawn in nor exhaled, but grasped at;and the answer to the question "Manyor One?" is most definitely manyplus one..."

From "What Prairie Poets Do and How They Watch The Sky"

Other poems resemble a frenetic newspaper page complete with contrasting quotes--George Bush and Guy Debord, varying fonts, advertising jingles, logos. Not easily replicated in a blog post. Others march across in columns, and everywhere there is a sense of revealing the aural and etymological echoes in language, intended and unintended.

they are cumming

and they are goingto cum

the woman sits

on her folded

lower

limbs

from "Faces of Bukkake 6"

The poems tickle, what can I say? And I like the images, the suggestiveness, the playfulness.

I love a one line poem. Twitter or no there is something satisfying about nailing an idea in so few words. Haiku's are good, and sometimes the one-line prose poem is a haiku too. Former Montrealer Todd Swift is one of a handful of Canadian authors to have the privilege of non-Canadian publication, and even fewer contemporary poets are blessed with selecteds. Why then has no one reviewed this book in Canada? This is certainly a fine accomplishment.

Karen Solie, Pigeon, Anansi 2009(in process)My favourite piece in Solie's new collection is actually prose. "Archive" gives us the history of a place, and a person through the taking and describing of a photograph. Calling to mind Walter Benjamin, as she has done in other poems, the archive builds horizontally--the moment of entry like a pinhole camera spreading backwards through the poem--is it a poem? It's very evocative, and for this poet in any case, in these unbound lines the poet's wit has room to move and build more associatively than the more conventional lyric poems. Is it the absence of metaphor that pleases? Is it the ambling thoughts? The thinking that permeates even as the poem is looking out?

The contemporary Canadian lyric poem can seem corseted--to great effect as we see with Joe Denham, Ken Babstock, Margaret Christakos and Dennis Lee--but not always. There are so many poems that seem artificially bound by formal concerns (and this is by no means limited to lyric poetry, all poems can suffer his). Admittedly this is an aspect of poetry this reader struggles with. So seeing Solie break out here is refreshing, and exciting. We have desciription: the "cable channel that seasonally devotes itself to a looped shot of burning logs, the possiblity that a "tiny smudge" is a bohemian waxwing in flight. Traces of narrative: "It's during this week that a university student kills herself by jumping off the bridge," "What is seen is true, as seen, though may be interpreted falsely..." Wonderfully strange and precise images and movements. The photographer comes and goes, the camera in her pocket, while "atoms move at an infinite speed" and "fresh treated water" pumped from the city becomes the world's first "man-made waterfall, 7.3 metres higher than Niagra Falls." What remains? What is seen? What is under, around, inside, informing and shaping what is seen? What is recorded? The expansive nature of this writing is exciting. What is it about prose that allows poets to leap? Like a great cape shot through with textures and holes, the universe of the poet is unveiled. It is rangier, made of varieties of surfaces and reflections. It is a bit wild. And I like it.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Delivered is the second book by this young New York based poet. I don't have the first, and so can't comment on the trajectory, but this one is, dare I say it, enjoyable. It has a lot of "my mother" poems, a lot of references to family, grandparents, the immigrant experience. One balks at such references, mostly because of the sentimentality usually found in tandem with such subjects. Here we have a fresh take though, and when that entry point is language, the results are quite surprising. Consider "The Puppy"

Immigrant families began to arrive and children were born. Eventually the children picked up English at school. The English was cool and light like a puppy but more useful. They picked it up and threw it at each other....

a prose poem in the surrealist tradition, yes. "Some thought it...cute...some compared back legs and length of fur..." When the poems come at identity and representation from a slant perspective they are quite fun and yes, pack a punch.

However, the poems don't always seem complete, or to have every word weighted, and even if a poem wants to appear as though it has bed-head, it probably needs to have each strand of hair accounted for... Still, the collection is inhabitable, pleasurable. The prose poems strong. You can hear Gambito read earlier work over at the Fishhouse and read a postcard poem here.

More to come on these titles, but at first glance I have to say that the Gaspereau books are absolutely stunning...really, very beautiful. Secondly, I have to say thanks to Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman for the small little book on conceptualisms--I highly recommend it and will be adding it to my teaching tools. Must I respond to the blog debates about this? I think not. All these blog discussions, the attacks and defending, just keep one away from the actual reading of books. So no more.

Friday, June 05, 2009

The Gitskan Nation is on the move. Lots of talk up here of alternative energy sources and how to deal with impending development projects. Meanwhile the heat is causing excessive melt and the Skeena is rising and faster than ever. This morning the small island where we have been camping had the outer trails closed as water rose up and over them.Unbelievably fast.And beautiful.

3briefly (at a sort of brink) — desiring as wedo “pure sound”separable from linguisticcode. I don’t know aboutthis. I don’t think any ofus, _________________, do more than signala portal that wouldopen on a room full ofsquirming words. Our mostprimitive noises seethewith translateability. Buta bird looks you in the

4eye, opens its beak andspeaks. He confesses hisproblem; like WoodyAllen making movies overand over again about aman who has killed hiswife, his mistress, hiswhore. One wants to smile,

5for to be entertained issuch release. Underneathwe start to hear thelow surge of schools of smallfish slipping into formation,coagulating each to the nextto prepare a ruse foran oiled shark whoseglide (leagues under the turquoise surface) splits thepurple belly of the ocean. All itis is gathering, seekingshelter, craving freedom.Words lock us to

6that (day-surgical) look that passesbetween us, you and I,resenting our mutualfixation on (the brink of) meaning.Can you not hear mesing, here, as a birdsingsto the patch of grasshe hops in? Weare only human,caught in ourcodes ofconfession.

7Unbearably literal. Addto this the difficultythat the bird is longgone, and can only sing inthe yardage ofyour waking dream whileyou drink beer in a bar.Someone will cough soon,and there are those fidgetinglike squirrels. We are likeanimals, and birds, likeliving creatures, and yetjust as

8tuneful begins to tremour thelikelihood that we are(irreconcilably) fixed to words, and willnever be disgorged from theircraving for clarity. Maybe I

9mean something simple,like the proof of a(stone), rocks at a shoreline,free of those timidsharks and deliberateminnows. Maybe Imean murder. Whatever. Iconfess, it is more profanewhen you are not yetdrunk, and when you aredrunk, it all starts toseem somehow likewhistling, like a trilledbreeze pricking at your forearm.

10It starts to seem likea bird could sing onlyfor you, without hishidden self lostforever (on the brink of) pure sound,like you could part thepurple sea between you, as ifyour (shark-)mouth could becomea gullet, a swallow,a belly. Perhaps we canlive inside each other in suchinnocence. All this Imention in my steely gaze

13morning’s fluid hum,one with all thecars, having positive thoughts,drinking a lot ofcoffee. The kind of day

14that starts well, a portal toa pleasant afternoon when Imight walk in the parkand (then go to the cineplex to) see a movie,shoving my hand undermy coatso no one can seeme rub and tug myclitoral gland in thedark theatre. Have thatpleasure, muffledblossom, insistentswirling, which women

15do as much asthose with cocks, but wedo not confess this sodirectly,so as not tomurder the image onelikes to code of us. Weare whore-like, sure,but only if you considerthe sexual woman’s directlook at you with(out mutual) wonder.There is this problem ofconfessionality. What if we

16don’t know how to putwords to that look, ifshe stares us downin broad daylight?Purple in her murmurings,her crispand centripetal moans. Maybe she’sfull of herself, a kind ofsong you cannot make yourway out of. Maybe she justdropped by to check yourfacebook status, chortlefor a moment, tweet at you.

17Perhaps her red breastis not yours, is nota mark of the male,after all. When she flashesa nipple, it is a glandyou cannot look awayfrom, and it is a wordwith a song you do nothear, and still it is onlycode, always coded, neverpure. We don’t know what

18will spurt out of it,whether drinking isappropriate, whetherleaving would be better, I’mnot making this up.Something about a yard,a song, and an audience.Moments later and hours ago. For

19(like you) I have not wanked offfor a while, and wouldlike to, soon, if only forthe release from thisproblem, which weighsin me, like languagewhen (what) you want (is) to(reside in music) and can’t thinkof the word, wordsto make sense of anocean parting,a bird agitatingtoward flight, the brief,